While I am certain that my mother had (or tried to have) The Talk with me roundabout sixth grade, I seem to have blocked that from my memory. Or perhaps I blew her off to stave off embarrassment and avoid the whole thing altogether. I likely said “Mooommmm I already know that, they gave us a class” and turned my back. She gave me a crude 1980’s era clinical pamphlet from the doctor’s office. I can recall looking at it in secret but I didn’t fully grasp the information.
But I still recall a few moments from my first Sex-Ed class. It was tradition at the time for the sixth grade class to take a field trip into the big city; both before and after the mortifying group class we took little jaunts to the Aviary, the Museum, etc. So we had bits of normalcy to cushion the shock, so to speak.
It was taught by a nurse and there were slides of health book style drawings and diagrams. I believe the moment she completely lost control of our sixth grade class was when she got to the “penis in vagina” part of what intercourse is. The whole class laughed. For a good five minutes. There was the usual nudging and giggling throughout but for the most part the boys and the girls didn’t acknowledge each other. We now KNEW THINGS that couldn’t be taken back.
But between the forced-group initiation and my discomfort on discussing such subjects after that with the likes of my mother, I actually didn’t learn much. In fact I clearly did NOT learn much even after the Sex-Ed portion of the eighth grade health class because when it came time for me to be in a sexual relationship four years later……I didn’t know much about my own genitalia. When my teenage boyfriend tried to lick my clit, I didn’t know what he was doing – but I didn’t like it and said “I think you’re in the wrong spot.”
It took another five years at least until I admitted to my then-boyfriend that I wasn’t sure where my clit was; he showed me. And it was another couple of years (late 20’s) until I was masturbating “properly” and experiencing something close to an orgasm. I truly had a number of years of being sexually active and not getting a whole lot of pleasure from it. I liked the idea of the act, and the pleasure I was giving my partner, more than the actual act of sex itself.
I wish I had been taught better, in more comfortable environments. Not in a classroom full of giggly peers and not by my mother who I didn’t like much. I would have been much more receptive if the teaching was done by a female I liked and looked up to, like any one of my cousins.
I know that should my future daughter refuse to let me talk, I’ll enlist outside help. But I also know that I want my daughter to know so much more than me, including how to masturbate and derive pleasure from sexual activities when she’s ready. I feel like I missed out on a number of “good sex years” by not knowing how to enjoy it.
My sex talk came from my mom when I told her I was six months pregnant at the age of seventeen. “Why didn’t you tell us you were having sex? We could have put you on something.” Not coming home until five in the morning apparently wasn’t enough of a clue for her.
When I had my daughter a short three months later, I vowed not to be that type of parent. The type who knows her mother got pregnant and married at eighteen, whose grandmother did it at sixteen, and who herself was pregnant and left to have an abortion at eighteen. I was going to be open, discuss the family cycle that was present for us, and hope to give my child a different outlook on sex.
Sex is an open topic for us, and has been for the whole fourteen years of her life. She knows her unmarried mother has a sex life that she enjoys, and knows that her mother doesn’t expect her to remain a virgin until her wedding night. I have told my daughter that sex is beautiful and something to be enjoyed when you are capable of dealing with the consequences of your choices. I have also told my daughter she should never have sex because someone else wants her to or she thinks she needs to make someone else happy.
Sex should have a natural conclusion, and unless you are getting there as often as the guy you are doing it with, you shouldn’t be doing it. If he cared about you, he would want you to be happy as well. I know so many girls who have sex to keep their boyfriend happy or to fit in, but who never learn the joy of it until much later in life.
By talking about sex and not making it a taboo subject, I hope to break the family cycle in the next generation that I wasn’t capable of breaking for myself.
My wife and I strongly believe in open communication with our daughter about sexuality and over the years we’ve had many opportunities to do sex education at home.
Just the other day, the Spawn asked Mrs. Kyle to explain exactly where the baby was going to exit her body. We’ve been talking about the whole process of pregnancy and childbirth since the Spawn became aware of her mama’s pregnancy. Mrs. Kyle grabbed a pen and paper and did a quick line drawing of the vagina and neighboring external features and explained where the baby would come out vs. where pee and poop came out. The Spawn listened and asked a couple of clarifying questions and then, “What about the bump? the one near the top? What’s that called?”
Mrs. Kyle went back over the drawing trying to ascertain which bump she was referring to. The Spawn volunteered to try her hand at drawing. The result was two concentric half circles with a triangular point near the upper part of the drawing — a sideways view of the labia and clit, rather well rendered.
“That’s your clitoris,” Mrs. Kyle explained. The Spawn nodded and repeated the name.
Mrs. Kyle, sensing a teachable moment, asked a follow-on question, “Do you ever touch yours?” The Spawn nodded in the affirmative. “Does it feel good?”
The Spawn responded with a big, smuggish grin, “It feels good and it’s very stretchy.” I exchanged raised eyebrow looks with Mrs. Kyle when she said ’stretchy.’
My wife continued, “Yes, it does feel good. It’s perfectly alright to touch it and feel good, but it’s something to do in private, do you understand?”
“Yes, I like to do it in my room sometimes.” The Spawn still sported a smile that spoke volumes about the number of times she had experimented, and the success of those explorations.
“Exactly. It’s something we do in private, that’s absolutely right.”
And with that conversation turned to something much more mundane, like getting computer time and cleaning her room. I was proud, once again, at the way my wife and I handled such conversations: matter of fact, informative, responsive to the child’s actual questions.
I had another teaching opportunity in June during our local Pride celebration. Two of the groups represented in the parade and at the park were trans-oriented: the New Boyz Club and the Gender Alliance. The Spawn and I were traversing the park, booth to booth, and she pointed to the New Boyz Club sign and asked what it meant, “What are ‘New Boyz,’ Mommy?”
I explained to her that sometimes people are born with bodies that don’t feel right to them. “For example, some people born with girl bodies feel like they should have been born with a boy body.” At this point she looked sharply up at me, “There are ways to change your body to be more like the one you wanted to be born with.”
I started to say something more about people getting surgeries to change their bodies, but at that point I’d lost her. Now she was moving on to the next booth, which featured lots of rainbow items. It may be that I’d gotten too explicit or that she wasn’t interested anymore. I’ve been slipping in information on gender, gender queerness, anything related whenever I can. These discussions often start with some observation she makes about me — my facial hair, my boyish haircuts, the way I dress. Little by little the information is accumulating and at some point, I hope we’ll be able to talk more about it.
I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, and, whenever that is, I’m confident that we’ll have a great conversation.
I don’t have any children, other than my four legged daughter, but I’ve always been intrigued about how people learn about sex. Obviously we are not born with the analytical knowledge of sex, merely a primal urge to fulfill. How does one talk to their child about sex without being too clinical or too detailed?
Growing up, I had two polar opposites in my household. My Mother believed in being open and honest about everything. While my Father on the other hand was very close minded and didn’t want to talk about anything aside from sports or construction. I think having the contrast in my youth helped balance me out. I had someone I was open with and someone I was topical with.
Just the other day my Mother retold the story of one of the first sex questions I ever asked. It happened while watching Night Court, one of the characters made reference to “Bull” being impotent. I didn’t understand this word, and always wanting to learn new things I asked her what it meant. Without skipping a beat she explained what an erection was (relating it to my “morning” issue) and that being impotent meant that he couldn’t have one anymore.
I don’t remember many events from my childhood, including that one, due to an accident that caused me to lose a good portion of my memory prior to sixteen, but I do remember not being confused about sex. Knowing that it had it’s pleasures and consequences. And that it often meant something different to girls than it did boys.
I guess I’m just really glad that I was able to ask questions without being told, “We’ll talk about it when you’re a little older.”
I never received “the talk” from anyone. In fact, my parents were so cagey about anything regarding my body, that when I was twelve and presented my mother with a story that a family friend had given me about tampons – that if you don’t stick one up inside you once a month, you become pregnant – she said tampons were nothing I needed to worry about. I got my period the month I turned thirteen, and waited three days of spotty bleeding before presenting my underwear to my mother while she was watching TV and asking if this was “the period thing” that I’d heard mentioned at school. “Yep, that’s your period,” she said, and turned back to the television. When I was around fourteen I found a copy of “The Joy of Sex” in my parents’ closet and asked if I could read it – my mother took it, turned to my father, and said, “We need to find someplace better to put this.” When I was sixteen, I became the brunt of merciless teasing for months, when I asked my friends after a health class what exactly an “orgasm” was, and whether people normally masturbated using their clitoris.
I also was told that I wasn’t permitted to date until sixteen. After that point, dating became a rather moot point, since I had begun boarding at an all girls’ school and knew no boys which weren’t either boyfriends or brothers of friends.
Which, if the stereotypes can be believed, would all end up making me either a sexually stunted wallflower or a raving, soon-to-be-impregnated nymphomaniac.
The truth was, I’d been having orgasms since I was twelve, having figured out that pull-ups felt “good” and going about learning how to deliberately manipulate my abdominal muscles to take that a few steps farther. I had a very, very active sexual fantasy life.
By the time I was out of high school, I was able to orgasm from several different nerve bundles, and I knew very well what turned me on and what didn’t. When I began having sex at 18 with my first real boyfriend, I was able to direct him to what I liked, able to figure out what he would like, and able to invent and be creative. My sex life has been very fulfilling. I credit at least part of that to having a sort of forced self-focus early in my sex life; because I had no one else’s desires or interests distracting me, I could focus on myself.
I now have two young girls. I plan to give them more information than I received. But I’m also going to encourage them to wait to date until they’re at least 17 or 18, so that they can have several years of no-pressure learning and happy orgasms before bringing another person into the picture.
I think that is an important lesson that everyone needs to hear: you can be single and still have a great sex life.
My parents divorced when I was 12, but apparently their sex life didn’t get the memo. I believe I was about 14, and old enough to understand these matters, when I busted my dad sneaking out of mom’s room (and the house). He claimed he was there to change the furnace filter – which did nothing to explain why he was standing in mom’s kitchen in his underwear. Clearly busted, he turned three shades of red and left.
Mom was rather flustered as well, and mentioned something about Dad checking a mole on her back. In wise-ass teenager mode, I asked, laughing, “Does changing furnace filters and checking moles involve love bites on your neck?” Busted AGAIN! With no clear way out, Mom fessed up that their marriage didn’t work but the passion always did. In a way, it was reassuring to me that they still had that level of love for one another even if they couldn’t live together. I charitably avoided discussing it with either of them further.
21 years after divorcing, they remarried and stayed that way until my father died. It was by no means a fairy tale, but there are plenty of fond memories.
I need to call mom and tease her about that. I’m long overdue for getting her all frazzled. :p
When I was in second grade, a boy on the bus said I had “sexy legs.” I had never heard the term so when I arrived home, I asked my mother what it meant.
I honestly don’t know what she said in response, but a few days later we found ourselves at the local park. My mother had decided that with the “sexy legs” comment, I should better understand sex. My mother went through the biological description, using the scientific terms and explaining the reason for sex.
At no point did she mention that it was also done for pleasure and until I was in high school, I genuinely thought my parents had had sex twice: once for me and once for my brother.
My mother and I are slowly growing more comfortable when it comes to discussing sex and sex-related issues. When she found out I had a vibrator her only comment was “You know, those can be a girl’s best friend”. She seems to be coming to terms with the fact that I, her only child, am a sexual being just as I am equally learning to acknowledge the same about her.
Now, my father has been sick as long as I can remember. His illness(es) started long before I was born, but the more severe ones didn’t kick in until around my sixth birthday. Since then we’ve been in and out of doctors, seen about every branch of medicine available, and keep a fold-out list of his medications because no form ever has enough room. He’s getting worse, and my mother and I are very open with his slow, downward spiraling health.
Eventually the two conversations overlap. He’s gone on testosterone therapy because the other medications have all but eradicated the hormone from his system. I don’t give a great deal of thought to their sex life beyond the quiet amusement that the rare nights their door is closed I assume they’re trying. Trying is the key, heartbreaking word.
Driving to the grocery store one day, I asked my mother if it was helping. We don’t discuss their sex life much at all, certainly not in specifics at this point.
She sighed, “No. I mean, it’s helping his mood, and for a while there it was helping.. some.”
I prompted her to continue.
“It’s just, it’s not..working. I mean, things…work, as they do, and the feeling is there, it’s just…not working.”
I gave her a half-frown of sympathy and told her as much was unfortunate, that it must be hard for her. It was then she said to me what has ended up being the most profound statement I’ve ever heard from her.
“You find out how much you love someone.”
It hit me then, and it hit me later all the more. My mother, a sexual person, has been unable to have sex with the man she loves for a very long time now. When I think about that, and I think about it in the context of my own relationship, with my own partner, it’s a lot to take in. Sex is a big part of my life, certainly a big part of our life as a couple. When I think about how much our relationship would be affected by the inability and lack of desire for sex, especially in the context of a couple decades, it nearly takes my breath away.
I gained a lot of perspective on that car ride. Her statement was another weighty piece in the already plenty complicated puzzle of sex, and it’s one I’m not likely to forget any time soon.
I was given porn magazines at the age of twelve by my grandmother (she raised me) who thought that if I had porn as a kid I wouldn’t want it as an adult. No other kids talked much about it to me as I was pretty shy. I sent away and faked my age to get more porn. I had at one time half a foot locker full of it, and didn’t feel all that good about it.
I feel as though it took two decades to learn about sex. Porn didn’t instill me with a bad feeling about it, since with my first sexual experience with my first girlfriend, I was so interested in understanding how to please I went to the library and looked up books on sex, especially cunnilingus.
This pattern continued after I left a marriage and I had to start dating; I started studying social dynamics and sex techniques. I still give a lot during sex. I made sure that when my son was old enough, that I gave him a good foundation on what it was, and a bit (as much as his seven-year-old mind could handle) about psychology between men and women.
Even though it’s been a long road, it’s been a joyous adventure to continue learning about sex, keeping it varied, and always a good dance together. The joke is on my grandmother, though, as I started an erotic publishing house, not at all like what I had as a kid though; much more artistic. Oh the irony!
I remember when my mother gave me the sex talk. I was seven years old. It was 1975.
She dispatched me and my two younger sisters, ages five and three, to the kitchen to “discuss something important.” Before she went about the business of making dinner, she instructed the three of us to sit together with our backs against the fridge. I remember its motor a gentle, lulling resonance as we all wondered what could be so pressing an issue as to pull us away from our Barbie dolls.
I don’t remember her exact words, just that they carried much weight, as if she had a burden to unload but was afraid to overwhelm us. I do remember that after she was done talking she showed the three of us a book. It was a hulking coffee-table book that was chock-full of graphic, 12 x 16 images; black and white photographs depicting people naked. I thought the pictures were fascinating, wondrous, and inherently beautiful. Inside the pages were artful photographs of nude, long-haired hippie women nursing their naked babies. In some pictures the father appeared beatifically peering over the shoulder of the mother, he too, free from the constraints of clothing. The second section of the book depicted children, also in the nude, and in various stages of explorative body play; a tweak at a child’s nipple by a curious four year-old or a point at a penis by an inquisitive toddler.
Many years later Mom learned that the (apparently) titillating tome had been banned from reproduction and distribution on the grounds that it constituted child pornography. However, I was not distressed at all by any of the pictures I witnessed. Nor was she. She was sure it was an appropriate introduction into the world of sex. What child would not be curious? In fact I was in awe. And it was an admiration that I would carry with me for many years.
I remember clearly during the summer break of the 3rd grade, while my mother was at work, babysitter planted in front of the television, my sisters and I making our way, quickly and quietly to Mom’s closet and unearthing that book hidden under clothing on a shelf. We would surreptitiously thumb through the pages, admiring curiously the candid, naked shots of these fascinating people. The last sections of the book were all pictures of men and women making love. On one page, the shot was a close-up of the shaft of a man’s penis, testicles dangling. Its girth filled the woman’s vagina, its glory masked in black, soft, bushy pubic fur. Other photos were less graphic, but they were still photos of men and women fucking.
And in the very last pages, there were pictures of babies. Babies being born, vaginas opening up, tiny heads crowning. And finally, couples looking into the eyes of their newborns and each other as if to say, “It was all worth it.” And, I remember that in all of the pictures in that book of photography, in the faces of the people who were literally laying themselves out there for the sake of sexual education and perhaps art, I saw something that I now, as an adult, equate with having sex. I saw ecstasy.
My mother showed us that book because she was adamant that my sisters and I be educated about sex. She herself was NOT and she paid for that lack of knowledge dearly. Mom had, before I was born, relinquished not one, but two babies for adoption.
The summer after I turned 21, and after my parents divorce was final, my mother sat the three of us down one afternoon at the kitchen table, much like she did the day she gave us the sex talk. She told us her story.
They were full siblings. My father’s children too; a baby boy and a baby girl, just one year apart.
I always knew I had a brother. From a very young age I could feel it in my soul. A charcoal drawing of me when I was three years old, with my bowl haircut and cable knit turtleneck could have been a portrait of a boy. I told everyone that inquired about it that it was my brother. Similarly, my imaginary friend, Tom, was my brother. In my mind, my brother had died. But, as I sat there that afternoon at the kitchen table as my mother told her story, I realized he was alive. The four of us decided that we needed to find him. We also needed to find her.
Mom wasn’t completely keen on the idea initially. She hated to disrupt their lives and she feared the rejection that was potentially imminent. But, after some persuasion by the three of us, aligned in solidarity by the notion that we had been denied their presence for so long already, she conceded. How could she possibly stand in the way of us getting to know them?
During our quest to find them, which included various methods, including private investigators, lengthy telephone calls to adoption agencies and letters put in their adoption files with information on how to contact my mother should they so choose, it dawned on me for the very first time ever, that my mother was a sexual being. She had not planned to have those babies. She hadn’t planned to birth any of us, except my middle sister. She had become pregnant because she liked having sex with my dad but was completely uneducated to the fact that a child could be produced from her pleasure. It was a revelation to me, to realize this other part of my mother. And it is truly when our relationship changed and we became not just mother and daughter, but also friends.
We eventually found the two babies who of course were by then grown up adults. And the relationships we’ve had with them have been somewhat awkward, often sporadic, and occasionally tumultuous. Which, given the circumstances, is to be expected really.
But I am happy to say that my brother, the one that on a deeply subconscious level I always knew was there, is in my life. Again. Finally.
And for that I can thank my mother. My mother who, because she liked sex and assumed that her daughters might too, enlightened us early as to what it is, what it means and how it works.
With pictures and everything.
–Submitted by Sexy Sadie, from Confessions from My Open Marriage
|
|
Recent Comments